Developed by David Owens at Vanderbilt University and customized for the cultural sector with National Arts Strategies, this course is designed to help arts and culture leaders create an environment where new ideas are constantly created, shared, evaluated and the best ones are successfully put to work.
One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks. This course will help those in the performing arts, museums, zoos, libraries and other cultural organizations build environments where new management and program ideas flourish.
Leading Innovation in Arts & Culture will teach you how to make an "innovation strategy" a fundamental component of your organization's overall strategy. In this seminar you will learn to:
- Analyze constraints on innovation in your organization, foresee obstacles and opportunities, and develop a shared vision
- Develop a process to manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities and the uncertainty inherent in new initiatives
- Create a culture for innovation and risk-taking that generates new perspectives and challenges existing practice
- Create a strong customer focus within your organization that anticipates customer needs
National Arts Strategies worked with David Owens to customize this course for those working in the cultural sector. They based their work on David Owens’ Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations course. This highly interactive 8-week course will engage you in a series of class discussions and exercises.

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From the lesson

Technological Constraints

This week takes the perspective on innovation of the scientist and engineer. This view holds that innovation is constrained by the laws of nature and our ability to manipulate them. It focuses on the physical limits we hit when we try to do things like improve acoustics, present light-sensitive artifacts in an engaging and immediate way, or bring together thousands of people in one place for a festival. We will develop a model of these "technological constraints" by understanding the roles of 1) our knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology, 2) the nature of time and sequencing, and 3) the natural environment and ecology that form the context for our innovation. The perspective is that innovation will fail when the proposed change does not function or functions in unanticipated ways.

Taught By

David A. Owens, PhD, PE

Jim Rosenberg

Transcript

[MUSIC]. So, how do we overcome these physical constraints? Well, one thing to do is sort of start out and figure out how hard the problem are we facing. You know, this is a really, really hard problem that's going to require lots of money and lots of time and lots of people. Or is this going to be an easy to solve problem, one that's not going to require all those things. And this is something that we can actually stop and, and try to estimate. We can find experts, people who have worked in field before, people who have solved these kinds of problems. we can develop schedules, we can you know, do a patent search, look at expert opinions. Those are all the kinds of things that can help us understand what's the nature of this kind of problem that we face. And often, people just sort of jump off into out of, out of excitement or out of, of ego jump into a problem and try to solve it without really sort of stopping and saying, okay, what kind of problem is this? How hard is this likely to be to solve? Another thing we can do is hire an alien. And what I mean here is well, let me just tell you a little story. I was once touring an insurance company, a health insurance company, and there were two gentlemen in a cubicle as we walked by. And the person who was, was guiding me around said, oh, yeah, those two guys, they were, we got them when they were working on the SETI. And I said, oh, the SETI. Like, you know, like, like the couch that you sit on? He said, no, no, no, SETI. Like, S, E, T, I. The, you know, the SETI project, which was a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And so, what these guys would do is sit develop ways of looking, with these, they had these radio telescopes looking into space. And they were just looking for intelligence, looking for some kind of signal there might be intelligent life out there. And so, there, you know, electrical engineers, statisticians, people like that, with those kind of skills. What kind of role do those kind of people have in an insurance company? You know, from the insurance company perspective, they certainly are Aliens. And so, as Aliens in the insurance company, what they bring, the positive thing they bring is they brought this ability to look at large, large amounts of data. And to begin to make sense out of it. And so, one thing was in the health insurance, you might have a person who gets a prescription. Then, they go to the doctor, get to go to the doctor, get a prescription. Then, something else happens and they get a prescription again. They go to the doctor. How do we understand that? What's, are there patterns there? Are there things that we can see, you know, really really small patterns happening out of this big amount of data. And these particular aliens are the ones who could understand that kind of thing. And so, you want to bring those people inside the organizations who have those kind of skills. And we talked earlier, you know, and from the organizational constraint perspective, for example, where these kind of people, it was really difficult to bring them in because we're not sure what they know, we're not sure how to work with them, we're not sure even whether we like them or not. But it's important that we do that. Next, we might let other people do the hard part. Eric von Hippel calls these people lead users. And so, lead users are people who are really they're often not, they're not professionals. They're not people who are paid to do this thing. But they're people who are so rabidly into a, a hobby or into a type of, of product that they just can't be stopped. And so, you may have a friend who has a, is a bicycle nut. And he's got a bicycle like that only weighs like, you know, three ounces. He can hold it up with his finger and goes 100 miles an hour. It's made up of carbon fiber or whatever. And, but this person is not a bicycle manufacturer. This person is a consumer of these things but who's always constantly tweaking and making it better, making it better, making it better. That person knows a great deal about bicycles. I also recall an example from a long time ago. it seems like long in internet years where people were fooling around with this thing called WiFi, you know, the wireless internet WiFi. And this one person that reported he had made a connection, a two mile connection on WiFi. That's pretty far, given the standard of WiFi is not that much, I believe like 300 feet, and, and not two miles. And the, the astounding thing that on each end of that two, two miles was a antenna made of a Pringles can. So, we know Pringles potato chips, you know, come in that little silver can. And they were able to make the connection using those. And so, those are the kind of lead users who have a great deal of understanding and who are pushing the limits of what we know. They don't have the kind of, of conscious competence that is that they don't know from, you know, modeling and analytics and they're not designing it that way, they're just trying things out and they're learning from that. And so, this might be a really good source of, of ideas, the kind of solutions that you may not come at in the sort of head-on conventional way. The next thing to know is to understand how far do I invest. The first problem is, is understanding how broad is this chasm. Because if you don't put enough resources and time and money and, and emotion into getting a across this chasm, and only put half of that in here, that's going to be a problem, right? You'll, you'll fall into the chasm. And so, understanding what is it going to take to invest. If this is the biggest project you ever signed off on, you need to understand that, and go ahead and commit. And if you're not willing to commit, you're not going to make it halfway, you're not going to make it all the way across the chasm by resourcing it only, only halfway. The other thing to understand, though, is to understand that some things are, you know, if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well. And so there, we also need to understand how hard is the problem, right? We just talked about that. How hard is the problem we're addressing? And understand that this cer, to reach a certain point, we may have to say to ourselves, you know what, it's not worth getting there. If you think about this in terms of you know, your, your chances of success. If you don't see success, if you don't see that you can be successful, and generally improve things, you may hit this point of diminishing returns, right? Where we invest more, and we invest more, and we invest more and we only get a little bit out of it. And so, look at a curve like this, you know, where more investment, you know, 80% more investment only gets you 20 % more performance. And you need to understand that and be able to say, okay, we've invested enough. We're at the point of diminishing returns. Either let's ship it the way it is wven though it hasn't met specifications, that's like the A12. Or let's stop the project because we're just putting good money after bad. And so again, we need to invest to a point. Understanding that, if you avoid failure, that is if you stop a project, even though you spent money and you stopped the project, if that failure is a success because you've avoided greater failure. And so, if we stop something that's not going to work in the long run, we stop people from putting their time into it, we stop people from putting their resources into it, money into it, all of these things. And we can use those on other projects and so we've avoided a great deal of opportunity cost by actually stopping something that by avoiding allowing our failure to allow us to avoid larger failure and then just put a stop on it. So, why some things are hard? Because the laws of physics. Because we don't understand how to make matter behave and if we pretend that we do, then that's just a setup for trouble. And so we want to make sure that we always stop and say, okay, do I understand what's going on here? And even if I don't, do I understand what I don't understand. Next up, Time Constraints.

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